In Australia, the US, England, Scotland, Italy, France and in Egypt there have been repetitive calls to legislate against the practices of female circumcision described as female genital mutilation. But in western countries where anti-female genital mutilation legislation has been passed there has been little or no consultation with the communities in which the practices occur: documents are published only in English, and community responses are ignored or simply deemed biased or irrelevant. Opportunities for dialogue quickly turn into opportunities for education and legislation about the unacceptability of the practices. But why are communities denied their capacity to speak and influence political opinion and legal decision making? Why in an era of human rights, which heralds the importance of self-determination, freedom of expression and women's participation in political arenas, are women from these communities unable to engage in dialogue on this practice? Law's Cut on the Body of Human Rights considers how such assertive legislative responses, and this lack of curiosity and consultation with communities, points to a particular liberal investment the practices called female genital mutilation and what they signify. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, Juliet Rogers examines the language of recent statutes and, where relevant, some of the accompanying policies and broader media debates, Female genital mutilation, she argues, elicits such a singular legal response insofar as it embodies that subjectivity against which the very subject of liberal law is imagined - and only imagined - to exist: in a state of non-mutilation, non-prohibition or, in a psychoanalytic idiom, non-castration.

For more than 30 years and until his death in 2004, Jacques Derrida remained one of the most influential contemporary philosophers. It may be difficult to evaluate what forms his legacy will take in the future but Derrida Now provides some provocative suggestions. Derrida's often-controversial early reception was based on readings of his complex works, published in journals and collected in books. More recently attention has tended to focus on his later work, which grew out of the seminars that he presented each year in France and the US. The full texts of these seminars are now the subject of a major publication project, to be produced over the next ten years. Derrida Now presents contemporary articles based on or around the study of Derrida. It provides a critical introduction to Derrida's complex and controversial thought, offers careful analysis of some of his most important concepts, and includes essays that address the major strands of his thought. Derrida's influence reached not only into philosophy but also into other fields concerned with literature, politics, visual art, law, ecology, psychoanalysis, gender and sexuality and this book will appeal to readers in all these disciplines. Contributors include Peggy Kamuf, Geoff Bennington, Nicholas Royle, Roy Sellars, Graham Allen and Irving Goh.

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This is a semiotic study of a corpus of texts that Kumarajiva (344-413 CE), Paramartha (499~569 CE) and Xuanzang (599~664 CE) transmitted from India to China, featuring a critical reading of the Dazhidu Lun (T1509, Maha-Prajnaparamita-upadeua-Uastra), San Wuxing Lun (T1617, Try-asvabhava-prakara.na), and Guangbai Lun (T1571, Catu.huataka-uastra-karika). Focusing its attention on the Mahayana Buddhist notion of samata, it identifies a Buddhist semiotics which anticipates Derrida's invocation of the notion of the Same in his deconstruction of binary oppositions.

The work of Michel Foucault has been influential in the analysis of space in a variety of disciplines, most notably in geography and politics. This collection of essays is the first to focus on what Foucault termed 'heterotopias', spaces that exhibit multiple layers of meaning and reveal tensions within society.

Originally published in English in 1971, structuralism was an increasingly important method of analysis in disciplines as diverse as mathematics, physics, biology, psychology, linguistics, sociology, anthropology and philosophy. Piaget here offers both a definitive introduction to the method and a brilliant critique of the principal structuralist positions. He explains and evaluates the work of the main people at work in the field - Claude Levi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, Talcott Parsons, Noam Chomsky - and concludes that structuralism has a rich and fruitful future ahead of it. An indispensable work for serious students and working scholars in almost every field, the book is also an important addition to Piaget's life-long study of the relationship of language and thought.

Jacques Derrida: Key Concepts presents a broad overview and engagement with the full range of Derrida's work - from the early phenomenological thinking to his preoccupations with key themes, such as technology, psychoanalysis, friendship, Marxism, racism and sexism, to his ethico-political writings and his deconstruction of democracy. Presenting both an examination of the key concepts central to his thinking and a broader study of how that thinking shifted over a lifetime, the book offers the reader a clear, systematic and fresh examination of the astounding breadth of Derrida's philosophy.

Ian Parker has been a leading light in the fields of critical and discursive psychology for over 25 years. The Psychology After Critique series brings together for the first time his most important papers. Each volume in the series has been prepared by Ian Parker, and presents a newly written introduction and focused overview of a key topic area. Psychology After Deconstruction is the second volume in the series and addresses three important questions: What is 'deconstruction' and how does it apply to psychology? How does deconstruction radicalize social constructionist approaches in psychology? What is the future for radical conceptual and empirical research? The book provides a clear account of deconstruction, and the different varieties of this approach at work inside and outside the discipline of psychology. In the opening chapters Parker describes the challenge to underlying assumptions of 'neutrality' or 'objectivity' within psychology that deconstruction poses, and its implications for three key concepts: humanism, interpretation and reflexivity. Subsequent chapters introduce several lines of debate, and discuss their relation to mainstream axioms such as 'psychopathology', 'diagnosis' and 'psychotherapy', and alternative approaches like qualitative research, humanistic psychology and discourse analysis. Together, the chapters in this book show how, via a process of 'erasure', deconstructive approaches question fundamental assumptions made about language and reality, the self and the social world. By demonstrating the application of deconstruction to different areas of psychology, it also seeks to provide a 'social reconstruction' of psychological research. Psychology After Deconstruction is essential reading for students and researchers in psychology, sociology, social anthropology and cultural studies, and for discourse analysts of different traditions. It will also introduce key ideas and debates within deconstruction to undergraduates and postgraduate students across the social sciences.

Ian Parker has been a leading light in the fields of critical and discursive psychology for over 25 years. The Psychology After Critique series brings together for the first time his most important papers. Each volume in the series has been prepared by Ian Parker, and presents a newly written introduction and focused overview of a key topic area. Psychology After Deconstruction is the second volume in the series and addresses three important questions: What is 'deconstruction' and how does it apply to psychology? How does deconstruction radicalize social constructionist approaches in psychology? What is the future for radical conceptual and empirical research? The book provides a clear account of deconstruction, and the different varieties of this approach at work inside and outside the discipline of psychology. In the opening chapters Parker describes the challenge to underlying assumptions of 'neutrality' or 'objectivity' within psychology that deconstruction poses, and its implications for three key concepts: humanism, interpretation and reflexivity. Subsequent chapters introduce several lines of debate, and discuss their relation to mainstream axioms such as 'psychopathology', 'diagnosis' and 'psychotherapy', and alternative approaches like qualitative research, humanistic psychology and discourse analysis. Together, the chapters in this book show how, via a process of 'erasure', deconstructive approaches question fundamental assumptions made about language and reality, the self and the social world. By demonstrating the application of deconstruction to different areas of psychology, it also seeks to provide a 'social reconstruction' of psychological research. Psychology After Deconstruction is essential reading for students and researchers in psychology, sociology, social anthropology and cultural studies, and for discourse analysts of different traditions. It will also introduce key ideas and debates within deconstruction to undergraduates and postgraduate students across the social sciences.

By far the biggest and most comprehensive volume on Bergson's contribution to philosophy published to date Covers all the major aspects of Bergson's work, with contributions by a high quality international field Explores Bergson in relation to important interdisciplinary topics, including modernism, Proust and post-colonial studies Bergson's star continues to rise due to growing interst in the history of 20th century philosophy - we are publishing a major new translation of his Creative Evolution in 2020 Part of an exciting new series that brings fresh perspectives to bear on the work and arguments of the major philosophers.

A thorough and state of the art overview of Logical Empiricism and an ideal reference source for both students and scholars. Essential reading for students and researchers in history of philosophy the handbook will also be very useful for those studying philosophy of science, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind or history of ideas. The only handbook to pull together a thoroughly comprehensive overview of the movement of logical empiricism. A rallying point for any student and researcher interested in the subject. All chapters are specially commissioned, written by an international team of renowned contributors and not previously published.

Sensitive to the discontinuities in Foucault's thought, neither critical nor slavishly devotional, On the Use and Abuse of Foucault for Politics demonstrates how Foucault is relevant for contemporary democratic theory. Beginning with a discussion of the interrelated ideas of power and resistance, Brent Pickett provides an interpretation of Foucault's political philosophy, including a comprehensive overview of the reasons for various conflicting interpretations, and then explores how well the different 'Foucaults' can be used in progressive politics. Accessible and insightful, On the Use and Abuse of Foucault for Politics is valuable for specialists in Foucault and for students of postmodern and democratic theory alike.

Jurisdiction in Deleuze: The Expression and Representation of Law explores an affinity between the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and jurisprudence as a tradition of technical legal thought. The author addresses and reopens a central aesthetic problem in jurisprudence: the difference between the expression and the representation of law. Deleuze is taken as offering not just an important methodological recovery of an 'expressionism' in philosophy - specifically through Nietzsche and Spinoza - but also a surprisingly practical jurisprudence which recasts the major technical terms of jurisdiction (persons, things and actions) in terms of their distinctively expressive or performative modalities. In paying attention to law's expression, Deleuze is thus shown to offer an account of how meaning may attach to the instrument and medium of law and how legal desire may be registered within the texture and technology of jurisdiction. Contributing both to a renewed transposition of Deleuze into contemporary legal theory, as well as to an emerging interest in law's technology, institution and instrumentality in critical legal studies, Jurisdiction in Deleuze will be of considerable interest.

Testimony demands the witness to demonstrate her knowledge-that knowledge that she must have by the fact of being a witness to something, even if this something exceeds the possibility of expression by any means amenable to verification. Expressing the Inexpressible in Lyotard and Pseudo-Dionysius: Bearing Witness as Spiritual Exercise rigorously studies the inexpressible expression provoked by two illustrative examples: the silenced testimony of the Holocaust survivor, in Jean-Francois Lyotard's The Differend, and the religious faithful, in Pseudo-Dionysius' The Divine Names. Though coming from vastly different philosophical moments, the methods used by Lyotard and Dionysius prove to dissolve the apparent heterogeneity of postmodernism and Neoplatonist Christian mysticism and open radical new lines of dialogue. Melanie Victoria Walton critically evaluates each thinker and tradition, rethinks witnessing, testimony, sublimity, and apophaticism, and then engages them together to forge a new reading of silence and eros. The resulting insights will be especially valuable to students and scholars of Continental philosophy, philosophy of religion, theology and religious studies, medieval studies, and Holocaust studies.

Yuri Lotman (1922-1993) was a prominent Russian intellectual and theorist. This book presents a new reading of his semiotic and philosophical legacy. The authors analyse Lotman's semiotics in a series of temporal contexts, starting with the rigidity of Soviet-era ideologies, through to the post-Soviet de-politicization that - paradoxically enough - ended with the reproduction of Soviet-style hegemonic discourse in the Kremlin and ultimately reignited politically divisive conflicts between Russia and Europe. The book demonstrates how Lotman's ideas cross disciplinary boundaries and their relevance to many European theorists of cultural studies, discourse analysis and political philosophy. Lotman lived and worked in Estonia, which, even under Soviet rule, maintained its own borderland identity located at the intersection of Russian and European cultural flows. The authors argue that in this context Lotman's theories are particularly revealing in relation to Russian-European interactions and communications, both historically and in a more contemporary sense.

Ugly, Useless, Unstable Architectures traces productive intersections between architecture and the discourses of Post-Structuralism and New Materialism. It investigates how their unique 'ontological regimes' can be mobilised to supersede the classical framework that still informs both the production and the evaluation of architecture. Throughout its three main chapters, this enquiry challenges one of the most prevalent tropes of architectural assessment: Beauty, Utility and Stability. Author Miguel Paredes Maldonado critically unpacks the spatial and operational qualities of these three idealised concepts, before setting out an alternative framework of spatial practice that draws from Gilles Deleuze's post-structuralist take on the production of the real and Manuel DeLanda's model-based branch of New Materialism. This book reads and situates a series of spatial works through the lens of this critical methodology to contest the conceptual aspects traditionally underpinning architectural 'value'. It posits that architecture can operate as a continuous, generative spectrum encompassing a broad range of potential configurations. Written for academics and students in architectural theory, design and contemporary philosophical thought alike, this book should appeal to a wide audience.

Law's Trace argues for the political importance of deconstruction by taking Derrida's reading of Hegel as its point of departure. While it is well established that seemingly neutral and inclusive legal and political categories and representations are always, in fact, partial and exclusive, among Derrida's most potent arguments was that the exclusions at work in every representation are not accidental but constitutive. Indeed, one of the most significant ways that modern philosophy appears to having completed its task of accounting for everything is by claiming that its foundational concepts - representation, democracy, justice, and so on - are what will have always been. They display what Derrida has called a "fabulous retroactivity." This means that such forms of political life as liberal constitutional democracy, capitalism, the rule of law, or even the private nuclear family, appear to be the inevitable consequence of human development. Hegel's thought is central to the argument of this book for this reason: the logic of this fabulous retroactivity was articulated most decisively for the modern era by the powerful idea of the Aufhebung - the temporal structure of the always-already. Deconstruction reveals the exclusions at work in the foundational political concepts of modernity by 're-tracing' the path of their creation, revealing the 'always-already' at work in that path. Every representation, knowledge or law is more uncertain than it seems, and the central argument of Law's Trace is that they are, therefore, always potential sites for political struggle.

The conviction that we all have, possess or inhabit a discrete culture, and have done so for centuries, is one of the more dominant default assumptions of our contemporary politico-intellectual moment. However, the concept of culture as a signifier of subjectivity only entered the modern Anglo-U.S. episteme in the late nineteenth century. Culture and Eurocentrism seeks to account for the term's relatively recent emergence and movement through the episteme, networked with many other concepts - nature, race, society, imagination, savage, and civilization- at the confluence of several disciplines. Culture, it contends, doesn't describe difference but produces it, hierarchically. In so doing, it seeks to recharge postcoloniality, the critique of eurocentrism.

Law's Trace argues for the political importance of deconstruction by taking Derrida 's reading of Hegel as its point of departure. While it is well established that seemingly neutral and inclusive legal and political categories and representations are always, in fact, partial and exclusive, among Derrida 's most potent arguments was that the exclusions at work in every representation are not accidental but constitutive. Indeed, one of the most significant ways that modern philosophy appears to having completed its task of accounting for everything is by claiming that its foundational concepts representation, democracy, justice, and so on are what will have always been. They display what Derrida has called a "fabulous retroactivity." This means that such forms of political life as liberal constitutional democracy, capitalism, the rule of law, or even the private nuclear family, appear to be the inevitable consequence of human development. Hegel 's thought is central to the argument of this book for this reason: the logic of this fabulous retroactivity was articulated most decisively for the modern era by the powerful idea of the Aufhebung the temporal structure of the always-already. Deconstruction reveals the exclusions at work in the foundational political concepts of modernity by re-tracing the path of their creation, revealing the always-already at work in that path. Every representation, knowledge or law is more uncertain than it seems, and the central argument of Law's Trace is that they are, therefore, always potential sites for political struggle.

This book uses a historical and theoretical focus to examine the key of issues of the Enlightenment, Orientalism, concepts of identity and difference, and the contours of different modernities in relation to both local and global shaping forces, including the spread of capitalism.

The contributors present eight in-depth studies and a substantial theoretical introduction, utilizing primary and secondary sources in Turkish, Farsi, Chinese, not to mention English, French and German in the effort to engage materials and cultural perspectives from diverse regions. It provides a critical attempt to think through the potentialities and limitations of area-studies and 'civilizational' approaches to the production of knowledge about the modern world, and the often obscured relationship between the fragment and the whole, or the particular and universal. The book is an intervention in one of the most fundamental debates confronting the social science and humanities, namely how to understand global and local historical processes as interconnected developments affecting human actors.

From Orientalism to Postcolonialism will be of interest to academics and postgraduate students in Cultural and Postcolonial Studies and Asian studies and Middle Eastern studies.

The conviction that we all have, possess or inhabit a discrete culture, and have done so for centuries, is one of the more dominant default assumptions of our contemporary politico-intellectual moment. However, the concept of culture as a signifier of subjectivity only entered the modern Anglo-U.S. episteme in the late nineteenth century. Culture and Eurocentrism seeks to account for the term's relatively recent emergence and movement through the episteme, networked with many other concepts - nature, race, society, imagination, savage, and civilization- at the confluence of several disciplines. Culture, it contends, doesn't describe difference but produces it, hierarchically. In so doing, it seeks to recharge postcoloniality, the critique of eurocentrism.

Reading philosophy through the lens of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, Andrea Cavalletti shows why, for two centuries, major philosophers have come to think of vertigo as intrinsically part of philosophy itself. Fear of the void, terror of heights: everyone knows what acrophobia is, and many suffer from it. Before Freud, the so-called "sciences of the mind" reserved a place of honor for vertigo in the domain of mental pathologies. The fear of falling-which is also the fear of giving in to the temptation to let oneself fall-has long been understood as a destabilizing yet intoxicating element without which consciousness itself was inconceivable. Some went so far as to induce it in patients through frightening rotational therapies. In a less cruel but no less radical way, vertigo also staked its claim in philosophy. If Montaigne and Pascal could still consider it a perturbation of reason and a trick of the imagination which had to be subdued, subsequent thinkers stopped considering it an occasional imaginative instability to be overcome. It came, rather, to be seen as intrinsic to reason, such that identity manifests itself as tottering, kinetic, opaque and, indeed, vertiginous. Andrea Cavalletti's stunning book sets this critique of stable consciousness beside one of Hitchcock's most famous thrillers, a drama of identity and its abysses. Hitchcock's brilliant combination of a dolly and a zoom to recreate the effect of falling describes that double movement of "pushing away and bringing closer" which is the habitual condition of the subject and of intersubjectivity. To reach myself, I must see myself from the bottom of the abyss, with the eyes of another. Only then does my "here" flee down there and, from there, attract me. From classical medicine and from the role of imagination in our biopolitical world to the very heart of philosophy, from Hollywood to Heidegger's "being-toward-death," Cavalletti brings out the vertiginous nature of identity.

This book of expert essays explores the concept of the whole as it operates within the psychology of Jung, the philosophy of Deleuze, and selected areas of wider twentieth-century Western culture, which provided the context within which these two seminal thinkers worked. Addressing this topic from a variety of perspectives and disciplines and with an eye to contemporary social, political, and environmental crises, the contributors aim to clarify some of the epistemological and ethical issues surrounding attempts, such as those of Jung and Deleuze, to think in terms of the whole, whether the whole in question is a particular bounded system (such as an organism, person, society, or ecosystem) or, most broadly, reality as a whole. Jung, Deleuze, and the Problematic Whole will contribute to enhancing critical self-reflection among the many contemporary theorists and practitioners in whose work thinking in terms of the whole plays a significant role.